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Abstract:

This study explores the ways in which the social problem of child sexual abuse is conceptualised and responded to within state and social systems in the Republic of Ireland, with an especial focus on the Irish state child welfare system. In so doing, it examines the experiences of a sample of children, young people and their parents/carers who came to state child welfare system attention (and that of other state and social systems) over a wide number of years because of concerns of a child sexual abuse nature. It elicits the attitudes, norms and beliefs of a range of professionals both from within and without the state child welfare system who are involved in responding to concerns about child sexual abuse. And it examines a range of social texts; documents and cultural records emanating over time from state and social systems that were selected for the individual and collective meanings they represent in relation to how child sexual abuse is conceptualised and responded to from within the Irish state. Essentially, the study is concerned with ascertaining whether such conceptualisations and responses can protect children from child sexual abuse, as well as facilitate healing and recovery for children and their non-abusing parents/carers. Qualitative research, structured, informed and guided by a critical feminist perspective was chosen as the most appropriate approach to a study such as the present. This was so because it rendered it unproblematic to situate children’s oppression by means of sexual abuse within a wider societal context of structural inequality predicated upon the oppression of those with less power. From this position, phenomena such as child sexual abuse and the state are looked upon anew in following Dean (1994), the ‘tireless interrogation of what is held to be given, necessary, natural, or neutral’. Interpretive research practices informed by critical and feminist theories in respect of both the interview data and the data generated from the social texts combined to produce holistic social explanations in relation to how and why child sexual abuse is conceptualised and responded to in the ways that it is by Irish state and social systems. Accordingly, a picture emerged of a state constructed and sustained conceptualisation of child sexual abuse as a threat to adults and institutions, actualised through fear and denial based responses to the issue that ultimately serve to contain the problem on behalf of a capitalist patriarchal social order. The consequences of this for the protection of children from sexual abuse, for the promotion of children and families’ welfare generally and for the prevention of child sexual abuse are profoundly harmful.